Blues miracle

Mississippi was great fun.  Getting to meet `Nate-Dog' and `The Gnome' and the various other criminal Welsh-types who gather around Ref21 was a pleasure.  And staying at a hotel where the guy behind the desk looked like Rod Steiger in `In the Heat of the Night' and who spoke in a strange language of which the words `Sears Jeans' was the only one I could understand (don't ask me why or how that phrase came up -- remember Linguistics 101: words get their meaning from how they are used in a sentence). The one disappointment: couldn't get to pay homage at the grave of Robert Johnson.  Why?  Because he has three graves.  Now one is normal, two is impressive, but three is surely just greediness or a miracle.  Perhaps good old Robert had too much talent for one body; he clearly needed three resting places. Worthy of a medieval saint, that one.

But it did make me think once again of Bono's (look him up on Wikipedia, Del) statement that the psalms are the blues of the Bible.  Ok, Bono is insufferably sanctimonious and the sunglasses.  Good grief!  But he's on to something here.   It is, of course, well-know to all but Del-Boy that Robert is supposed to have obtained his guitar skill from selling his soul to the Devil at a crossroads (though I think the earliest reference to that is from the early 1960s); but the music is surely far from devilish.  The poverty in the little bit of MS I saw was probably no worse than that in Philly, but it gave me a feel for how the distinctive music and language of the Blues could only develop amidst the agony and dispossession of the rural poor in a setting like the Deep South.  And blues requires suffering -- compare Johnson's recordings to, say, Eric Clapton doing the same.  Clapton is a technical genius on guitar; but somehow he lacks that edge which Johnson and others, such as Big Bill Broonzy and B B King possess. 

Blues arose out of, and gave voice to the hopes and despairs of the disaffected, the poor and the marginalised.  The psalms do the same for us as Christians.    It's a shame that psalm singing has been neglected by 99% of the church and domesticated by much of the remaining 1%.   The greatest album never recorded is surely one of psalms sung by Robert Johnson, Robert Plant or Nina Simone.  Or all three of them together.  Or should that be all five of them......